1. Field of the Invention
The present invention is in the field of telephony communications including data network telephony and pertains particularly to methods and apparatus for balancing agents between agent groups working a blended campaign of stochastic inbound and predictive proactive inbound interaction flows.
2. Discussion of the State of the Art
In the field of telephony communications, communication centers exist for the purpose of sales and servicing customers of small to large enterprises. In today's marketplace, communication centers are typically multi-media capable and handle incoming calls and requests from telephone networks and from the Internet network.
In call-center systems profit margins and agent efficiency rates are very important as is maintenance of service level objectives (SLOs) that are sometimes contractually ordered by the enterprise contracting call center services. In a call center (CC) agents are typically assigned to answer incoming calls and may be organized into groups that are trained in one or more specialized skills to handle a specific set of problems.
It is desired that higher levels of service are provided to more valuable customers in order to improve profitability for the CC. However, incoming interaction flow is usually stochastic in nature, and it is difficult to predict the average level of incoming interactions that would utilize live agents assigned to work interaction queues. Therefore in many cases, service level objectives are still difficult to maintain during peak and valley levels of inbound interaction flow including inbound interactions resulting from outbound calling campaigns. Moreover, it is difficult to schedule call center agents for shorter periods enabling more flexibility in resource building.
In many cases, agent pools are underutilized during periods of low arrival rate of stochastic inbound interaction flow. Offline work can be used to fill the time of idle agents, but if the agents could stay engaged with live interaction for longer periods, the overall profit and efficiency model for the call center would be better served.
Therefore, what is clearly needed is a system for producing traffic proactively, and for dynamically managing the proactive traffic with service traffic to more fully utilize agents in the CC.